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--• ('�c�mprchcn�i� c ?�'ci,�hrourh��n�l Stuciic.� C'1�arartcri�it,�� r�� ' finance, insurance, property or business services and have higher-than-average incomes. These demographic characteristics of the residents repopulating inner cities are common for other large Australian cities (ibid.). 2.5. Are Canadian Cities Different? There is a continuing debate about whether urban growth patterns in Canada are similar to those of the U.S. (Bourne 1982, 1997; Rothblatt 1994, Richardson and Gordon 1999). Goldberg and Mercer (1986) in The Myth of the North American City have examined contrasts between Canadian and U.S. settlement patterns and the differences they found were not very significant. Similarly to the U.S., the urban geography of city decline in Canada's largest urban regions is far more complex than a simple inner- city/suburban divide. Bourne (2000) contends that the areas of population decline have moved further out from the city centre. Broadway and Jesty (1998) suggested that the absence of an extensive literature documenting inner-city deprivation indicates that Canadian inner cities might possibly be resistant to the structural economic and demographic changes that have affected inner cities in Britain and the US. But results of their research Are Canadian Inner Cities Becoming More Dissimilar? An Analysis of Urban Deprivation Indicators fail to support this argument (ibid.). Bourne describes Canada's suburban development as "typically North American" (19R7). Between 1951 and 1996, due to middle-class flight, the central city population share in Vancouver fell from 64 per cent to 29 per cent, in Montreal from 74 per cent to 32 per cent, in Ottawa from 74 per cent to 31 per cent, and in Toronto from 58 per cent to 15 per cent, which is comparable to the U.S. decentralisation patterns (ibid.). During the 1980s and 1990s, the distribution of income within Canadian society became more polarised (Gertler 2001, Hatfield 1997, Lee 2000, Bradford 2002}. These negative trends reflected a deep restructuring of the Canadian economy including recessionary conditions, continental and global production rationalisation (globalization), and technological change. As Kevin Lee (2000) has documented, the total population in metropolitan areas grew by 6.9 per cent between 1990 and 1995, while the poor population in the same areas grew by 33.8 per cent (as defined by Statistics Canada Low Income Cut-Offs). Examining the decade between 1980 and 1990, Hatfield (1997) also found convincing evidence of increasing spatial polarisation and concentration of poor households. Although the national family poverty rate did not change significantly over this decade, the proportion of poor urban families living in very poor neighbourhoods increased from 12 per cent to more than 17 per cent. Hatfield provided evidence of a growing tendency for the urban poor to become spatially concentrated within the poorest neighbourhoods of Canada's cities. Montreal was identified as the city with the highest rate of spatial concentration of poor families, 40 per cent of which were living in very poor neighbourhoods by 1990. Very poor neighbourhoods in Winnipeg were home to 23.5 per cent of the city's poor families in 1980 and 39 per cent by 1990. Hatfield also documents that significant numbers of high poverty census tracts in Canada were 16